


when there are no second chances

by reafterthought



Category: Colorful (2010)
Genre: Alternate Ending, Gen, Regrets, ffn challenge: diversity writing challenge, ffn challenge: ficletchap competition, ficletchap, mentions of canonical suicide, second chances don't last forever, word count: 10001-19999 words
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-05
Updated: 2017-11-17
Packaged: 2019-01-29 17:59:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 14
Words: 11,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12636261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reafterthought/pseuds/reafterthought
Summary: In which a second chance is really just an opportunity to let go of regrets, and time doesn't stop for anyone.





	1. Time

**Author's Note:**

> Written for
> 
> The Ficletchap Competition (7.5-15k)  
> Diversity Writing Challenge, i20 – a multichap with chapters under 1000 words
> 
> Warning for character death and mentions of a canonical suicide.

'Have you made your peace yet?' PuraPura asks, and in that moment Makoto is sure he isn't going back.

 _I'm sorry,_  he thinks. There's no point saying it out loud. The people he's apologising to won't hear him anyway.  _I'm breaking my promises._

PuraPura regards him, face as blank as it's always been. But there's a tinge of pity in his tone.

He'd known. Of course he'd known.

'I guess… I misunderstood.' And Makoto laughs, because he remembers the beginning, when he didn't want to take a free shot at a second chance and now, when he's actually invested in it and wants to keep on going and finding his future, he realises it wasn't that sort of second chance at all.

If he'd known though… He'd wasted a lot of time anyway.

'Your soul's crossed into the realm of death,' PuraPura points out. 'The higher ups can only keep you here for so long, but it can be the difference between going to heaven and going to hell.'

'Making my peace… huh.' Makoto plops down on the roof. It's cold under his uniform but that doesn't really matter. There's a chill spreading through his body anyway. 'I guess I have.'

Even if, in the beginning, he hadn't realised who he was, he's still gotten closer to his father, made peace with his mother, understood Hiroko better, made a friend in Sataome and apologised for how he'd tried to shove Shoko away. That's a good six months' work, he figures. He hasn't managed to make peace with his brother, though.

His brother who's tried to make peace with him twice over.

'Not everything is done with words,' says PuraPura. 'Not directly, either. Would the Mitsuru of before have sacrificed a year of collage so you could go to the best possible school for you?'

'He was wrong, in the end.' He wraps his hands with his scarf. 'But if I hadn't become friends with Saotome…'

'Then he would have been absolutely right.' PuraPura squats down. 'There's still a little time, you know. Not enough to make it to him, but if you wanted to…'

Makoto stares at his bag. His phone is in there, but what will he say? Will Mitsuru even pick up at this time? He'll be at cram school. His phone might be off. Or he might ignore the call. Or Makoto might trip over his own words…

There is also his sketchbook.

He can write a letter.

Or he can draw.

.

PuraPura watches him snatch his sketchbook and pencils. Watches the eraser tumble and tumble until it tumbles right off the roof. Watches Makoto sketch with a fever that rarely grips him. Watches a drawing form faster than ever before.

It's a memory, of the time Mitsuru carried him home. The time he'd tried to change his image, not quite grasping the enormity of what he tried to outrun. The time those older kids had jumped him and beaten him up and stolen his new expensive shoes. But it was also that which led Saotome to extend an arm to him.

The pencil digs into his fingers. The marks won't last long… or they'll last for eternity. Who knew? He can't stay to find out. His time here is nearly up. Both their times are nearly up.

Makoto drops his pencil, eventually. Its clatter rings loudly on the roof that houses just the two of them: two departing souls.

'Are you done?' asks PuraPura.

'Yeah.' Makoto continues to stare at his sketchbook. 'Yeah, I'm done.'

'You've made your peace?' PuraPura checks.

'I've made my peace.' Then he laughs. 'Though I'm not ready yet. I don't think I'll be ready soon, either. Isn't that silly? After killing myself…'

'There's a second chance if you almost die,' says PuraPura. 'But not if you do die. I'm sorry.'

'Don't be.' Makoto rubs at his eyes. He's crying. Crying because he killed himself without a care and now he has to pay for it. 'It's not your fault. And… you've let me do this. Thank you.'

'Thank me after you decide if you like heaven or not.' PuraPura smiles. 'And tell me how it is. I've never been.'

Makoto doesn't ask if he's been to hell. That's not the last thing in the world he wants to know.


	2. Frozen

Shoko wonders what could be keeping Makoto. He’s asked her to wait, so she waits. Waits in their homeroom until the sun starts dipping and painting the winter sky in streaks of pink and she wonders if Makoto’s forgotten to come back.

That doesn’t seem like the Makoto she knows, especially after receiving validation that she _does_ know him that well.

Well enough to frighten him, anyway. Even if that isn’t what she meant to do.

She leaves the classroom to the pink-tinged sky. Where did Makoto say he was going? He didn’t, but he’s not at his locker, or in the art room and there’s no way he’ll be at the gymnasium.

The roof then, she wonders? She climbs the steps anyway, shivering in the cold, and pushes at the door until it opens with stubborn creaks.

Makoto’s bag is the first thing she sees, tipped on its side. She knows it’s his because of the pencil-case next to it, though it’s spilt and there’s some things missing. But no-one else she knows carries art supplies with them – and there, she can see the corner of the sketchbook as well, pages rustling in the breeze.

She pushes the door open further. Makoto is lying face-down on his sketch-book. His scarf ends rustle like the pages he’s not pressing down. He’s still wearing his school shoes: plain white and not the colourful sneakers he brought at the store with Sataome.

                ‘Makoto?’ she asks, from the doorway still. ‘Are you okay?’

Nothing.

She steps through the doorway. ‘It’s cold out here. You should come inside.’

Still nothing.

She steps even closer, tentatively because that day in Makoto’s bedroom, with Makoto so _different_ , is still fresh in her mind –

But he told her he was trying to scare her away, because he was scared. She thinks that’s the truth. She told him things he didn’t want to hear.

And he did things she didn’t want him to do, even if she didn’t have the right to selfishly wish for it to be so.

She’s close enough to touch him, now. And when he doesn’t respond to his name for a third time, she does. She pokes him tentatively, then shakes his shoulder, then rolls him onto his back when neither of those things garner a response.

And then she shrieks, because he wasn’t asleep like she’d thought. His eyes are half-lidded but open and black, staring at nothing.

He still says nothing, does nothing.

She doesn’t touch him again, but she also doesn’t move.

It’s only when a teacher and a gaggle of students, attracted by her shriek, arrive is she able to look away.

.

Shoko shivers in the infirmary. She’s not the only one. The club that had followed the teacher is huddled there too. One is still retching into a bin.

She can’t blame them. Her own stomach churns at the sight of the murky black of his eyes. And her head and heart both reel. She’d just talked to him, after school. He’d asked for her forgiveness. He’d smiled. Promised he’d come back after meeting someone, and they’d talk some more.

Where was that person he’d gone to meet? Who were they? Saotome? Hiroka? Someone else she wasn’t aware of? It had to be someone in the school, to have still been on the roof.

But she doesn’t understand. She doesn’t understand at all. Doesn’t understand how meeting someone turns into drawing himself on somebody’s back, and how that turns into him sprawled over his sketchbook like the corpse he’s become.

When the ambulance came, they pronounced him dead on scene.

Shoko doesn’t think she’ll ever forget how his dead eyes looked.


	3. Teacher

When he hears the scream, he’s not sure what to think. A corridor fight, perhaps, except the corridors are empty.

There’s another scream. It’s coming from above them. They’re on the second floor though, so it must be coming from the roof.

He hopes someone hasn’t tried to jump off the roof. It’s never happened at their school before, but there’s the occasional story of a bright young student committing suicide by jumping off their school roof, so it isn’t outside the realm of possibility.

As a teacher though, he wants it very badly to not be that. Whether he’d know the student or not, it’d feel like a personal and professional failure.

When he gets up to the roof, there’s a girl, frozen on her knees. And in front of her is someone else, clad in uniform.

He puts a hand on the girl’s shoulder. She looks at him. ‘Makoto,’ she says. Her voice his hoarse.

The teacher’s name is not Makoto. So that must be the name of the student lying there.

He goes to him. He’s on his back, staring up at the sky with black murky eyes and the teacher feels a stone sink into his stomach.

He calls an ambulance, but part of him thinks it might already be too late.

.

The nurse has taken the students into the infirmary, and the paramedics are taking the body to the hospital for proper paperwork and he’s left with the task of informing all appropriate bodies.

It’s the hardest thing he’s ever had to do. And for the longest time, he just stares at his phone.

The hospital calls before he’s managed to call anyone himself. And maybe that’s a good thing, he thinks. Maybe they can tell him they’ve all been mistaken.

They don’t. They only confirm what’s already known.

Kobayashi Makoto is dead, and now people need to be told.

In the end, he only tells one person: Makoto’s father. The rest of the calls he makes are to faculty members and it’s just for an emergency meeting. They grumble. They ask why. They come anyway.

Not ten minutes in, Makoto’s homeroom teacher is rushing off to the hospital. It’s hours too late to do anything. It’s always been hours too late.

He wishes it was another teacher who got up there first. At the same time, he wouldn’t wish this on anybody.

.

Thankfully, he’s not the principal. He can take a back-seat to the rest of the proceedings and it’s the principal who calls an emergency assembly the next day and the principal who announces, on stage in front of the entire school, that Kobayashi Makoto passed away last night of a heart attack.

They call it a heart attack, anyway. For all intents and purposes, his heart just… stopped.

He doesn’t mention the backstory. Doesn’t mention how Makoto had missed a month of school six months ago after attempting suicide. Doesn’t mention how Makoto had struggled to find meaning in his life again. How Makoto had been doing so much better, these last few weeks.

He doesn’t know Makoto. But some of the other teachers do and they all know _of_ him, of his circumstances, because they’d had an emergency staff meeting six months back as well.

Knowing it’s the same student who got knocked off his uphill climb is all the more heart-wrenching, but for his family’s sake, they’ll be the only ones to know.

.

They forget about the media, the bloodhounds they are. There’s a piece in the paper two days later and the principal has to give another debrief in the second emergency assembly in three days to explain the whole story.

It’s not fair to Makoto’s family, but worse will come out of letting rumours fester. And it’s not a suicide, no matter what the papers say. The suicide attempt was six months ago. This… just is, and it’s a tragedy because it’s the second chance that’s been snatched away after being tantalisingly dangled in his face like a carrot.

He wonders what Makoto thought, as he died. If he’d known he was dying, of course. It was sudden. It was on an uphill climb and was he still in that headspace from six months before or had he managed to escape it before his misfortune?

‘He told me he’d finally decided his school,’ said Makoto’s homeroom teacher. ‘He’d started putting more effort into his school work. His rank had climbed up… though to be honest, anything better than last place was an improvement.’ He laughed, then snorted, then blew his nose and rubbed his tears away with the same tissue.  ‘I thought he’d finally found the future ahead of him, but now…’

Suicide or natural death or anything else… The real tragedy is when they have futures they can’t live anymore.


	4. Hospital

Mitsuru has been to the hospital four times. Three of them have been because of Makoto.

The first, of course, is when he’s born. It’s not a complicated delivery but Makoto comes out yellow. His parents tell him that’s not so unusual, except he _stays_ yellow to the point where they put him in a light box.

The second time is when their grandmother dies, failing to thank their mother for all her hard work in caring for her.

The third time is when he takes their mother’s sleeping pills: pills nether Mitsuru nor his father knew about until that day. And when he wakes up, he’s so… different. Like he doesn’t know any of them. It doesn’t last for very long though. He clams up into his shell and refuses to come out.

In between this and the next time is when Makoto fails to come home one day, and Mitsuru finds him at the shrine they used to play at when they were kids, all beaten up and without any shoes on his feet.

Mitsuru wondered when they stopped playing together on shrine steps and started building the behemoth wall that sits between them now.

He wants to knock down that wall, but their family is still awkward and fragile.

Makoto still draws, though. That hasn’t changed.

So he thinks. Makoto is obviously not happy where he is. He is happy drawing. He’s not happy at home so maybe a boarding school would be a good change of pace for him. A boarding school with totally new classmates and an excellent art programme and Makoto is good enough to get in with his art, he thinks.

He’s flabbergasted when Makoto says he wants something else, to go to a public high school with his friend.

What friend? Where was this friend when he was in the hospital? When he was ostracised by his classmates? When he was beaten up? When he couldn’t talk to his own family and needed someone more than ever? Where was this friend then?

And now, the fourth time, it’s to identify Makoto’s already cold and stiff body and Mitsuru doesn’t understand it at all.

.

The hospital is cold and distant. After the third time, he decides he wants to be a doctor because if he couldn’t help Makoto as his big brother, he can at least do this.

This fourth time, he finds himself changing his mind again. Nobody can help Makoto now, and to be the person to tell a grieving family and then bury it all so they can help the next person…

Mitsuru isn’t sure he’s cut out for that sort of thing. Or maybe it’s because it’s his little brother.

Their mother and father are crying. Why isn’t here?

_‘You don’t even care, Mitsuru!’_

He wonders if that was true, at some point. He wonders if it’s still true.

And he wonders when and why it was that Makoto stopped calling him Ni-san.

It doesn’t matter now. Any regrets he has, any regrets Makoto might have had (or not had).

And in those hours before they’re ready to sit down with the doctor and ask the question why, he wonders if this is another suicide.

The last one had been so sudden, too. Sudden because Makoto was always quiet and withdrawn and nothing in particular had seemed different until he didn’t wake up one morning. It was in the months after that they understood. When Makoto snapped out of that dazed dream and ate rice for dinner every day, ignoring their mother’s home cooked meals and even the jacket she’d picked out for him.

It’s really obvious after that, and Mitsuru wondered how he’d managed to miss all the family drama.

Things start straightening out, after that though. Their father takes Makoto on a fishing trip and they must have a heart to heart. And maybe his own words get through as well. It’s hard when they barely talk to each other.

It’s harder when they still don’t understand each other.

Mitsuru doesn’t think he’s stepping on toes when he encourages his baby brother to go to a school that’ll make him happy. Mitsuru doesn’t think he’s being unreasonable. He thinks _Makoto_ is the one being unreasonable, for pinning his hopes on a friend that’s only been there for a month or so, and probably won’t last much longer.

But Makoto’s invested. Makoto’s not invested in anything, not even his art. He just does it and he’s good at it; it’s like talking for him. But this friend… He’s invested in this friend.

 _Well, okay…_ Mitsuru thinks. But he wants to meet this friend at some point.

Or he did. It doesn’t matter now. Even this friend isn’t enough. Or maybe it’s because of him…

That idea is guiltily nuked when the doctor explains the cause of death. Heart attack. Sudden, unexpected and unstoppable. And there’s nobody they can blame.

His parents cry. And, finally, tears trickle down his own cheeks, unchecked.


	5. Funeral

The funeral isn’t quite the quiet affair they should be. The media tries to sneak in. The school kick up a fuss and the police send a few men down to guard the doors because children and privacy are involved.

The Kobayashi family are grateful. It’s bad enough the whole neighbourhood knows the gist of what should have been a private tragedy. And the looks are a mix of pitying and scorning, and not one of the surviving Kobayashis were spared.

It’s not fair, for them to have their mistakes splayed out like that. It’s not fair when Makoto’s mother’s lips wobbled each time someone looks at her, and then looks away. It’s not fair when Makoto’s father makes fists so tight his palms are bleeding by the end of it and no-one notices or cares. It’s not fair when Mitsuru’s forced his eyes open so long they’re red and stinging, but he can’t afford to blink too often because he can’t cry and prove he cares.

Crying isn’t the only way people display grief, but it’s the one easily recognised. Poor Mitsuru, who isn’t the sort of person who can burst into tears and who’s slowly drowning in the weight of them building up behind his eyes.

And his mother. Yes, she’s at fault for going off with another man while married but there’s her own emotional state to consider. And only the Kobayashi family know: that talk Makoto and his father have by the river while they fish explains it all. She suffered all alone, and he (the father) was so busy at work, he barely noticed. So she took medication to sleep. So she danced to loosen up. So she took someone’s companionship at face value and then wound up suddenly too deep.

And then Makoto sees them, and her internal guilt is suddenly personified by him, by the dead-weight she tries to drag out of bed the next morning and she finds she can’t. By that near-dead child lying in the hospital bed. By the boy who seems to recognise nothing at all until the memories come back, and then he’s her guilt personified again and she’s slammed with it again and again.

Makoto apologises eventually, when he looks at the picture at a slightly different lens.

Most people just saw the woman who’d cheated on her husband.

Most people just saw the man who is always too busy at work. They don’t know that long day trip. They don’t know how they’d all made plans, after Makoto graduated from junior high, to ride the train far out and have a family trip with the four of them. They don’t know how Mitsuru’s dragged into more games of shogi now than he ever was, because it’s a good opportunity for father and son to bond, and he’d planned to broach the topic with Makoto again (because he’d never seemed interested…)

And when the lens is focused on the family, the few friends escape.

Shoko doesn’t stay very long. Makoto’s eyes have been closed now but she still remembers them open, on the roof. A teacher follows her when she leaves. That’s fine. That’s their responsibility. But they don’t understand. Makoto said she’d understood him well: too well. She doesn’t understand now at all. It’s like a god gave him hope and then pulled the rug out from under him. It’s exactly like that, she thinks. They pulled the rug from under the entire family’s feet, she thinks. And that’s sad, because despite their mistakes, they’re nice people. She knows that. She’s met them, after all.

And Saotome can’t quite wrap his head around it either, because Makoto had faded into the background before popping up and now… He still expects Makoto’s bike to be there, after school. Keeps expecting him to go that same desk in the library, pull out the study books and make that same error in every long division problem before Saotome points it out and he has to erase them and repeat them all over again. He still expects they’ll get together on Sunday and go out somewhere, and it’s remarkable how much of the town they haven’t visited. But they’ve got plans. And next year they’ll both go to the same high school together. This year, they’ll take the entrance exams and get similar marks (though hopefully not being ranked thirty-first and thirty-second in a class of thirty-two again). It’ll hit him eventually, he thinks, but it hasn’t hit yet. And aren’t funerals supposed to help with that sort of thing, but there’s something in the air that won’t let him settle things.

Of course they won’t. There’s blame being tossed around and rumours the media’s fuelled and Makoto doesn’t deserve this. Neither does his family. Makoto’s mother didn’t even deserve the four month silent treatment Makoto gave her, and he confesses that much himself. Of course, Makoto’s biased, but it’s Makoto’s opinion that should matter the most right now, isn’t it? Makoto set things right with his family, and with Shoko and Hiroko too. And he’d found something to work towards. It’s the best time. It’s also the worst time.

Aah. He’s crying now, finally, and his little siblings are latching on to him to comfort him.

And Hiroko clutches a new handbag and an old tube of black paint that’s already ruining the lining, and she cries because Makoto is the only one who understood. The stares are off her for once and it’s almost funny why, but she can’t laugh. That’d be too cruel, too disrespectful. And she loves pretty things and she wants to ruin pretty things but this isn’t it: this isn’t what she meant or what she wants, and she doesn’t think she has any fault in this either. Nor does anyone. It’s a freak tragedy; that’s all. Everyone else is just complicating it with things that happened before. Everyone has skeletons in the closet. A funeral should put padlocks on the doors.


	6. Home

Home was the eye of a quickly passing typhoon but it’s quiet now. People flocked outside but few ventured in. And that was fine. That suited the entirety of the Kobayashi family.

Reporters lingered for a bit before a new story swept their attention away. And people watched and offered gazes of scorn and pity and empty condolences. And then they grew bored and left, and the story of the Kobayashis aren’t spontaneously raised anymore.

Naturally, no-one forget. No-one needed to forget; it went from something right in front of them to something printed in the newspapers some time ago. It may become one of the fables of their town or it may fade further until it’s forgotten entirely. Perhaps the latter is better for the family. Perhaps they don’t care either way.

They know their sins. They also know they’d been on an uphill climb before the carpet had been yanked out from under their feet. Makoto’s mother had been so happy her family was eating at the table together. After the funeral, they barely eat at all, and when they do, it was courtesy dishes from friends or something easy to make. And it was sadly reminiscent to how Makoto had been those first few months: eating rice silently, vanishing before finishing the dishes and the oppressive quiet that hung over the household.

It takes some time before the silence cracks. It begins when Makoto’s father runs out of leave, and Mitsuru’s school rings to say he can’t afford any more absence days. They go, reluctantly, and the eyes of their workmates and classmates are all too heavy, and Makoto’s mother finds herself alone once more.

Last time, she’d gone out: socialised, made friends… and fell into an affair that almost destroyed her family. This time, she stays inside the house. Cleans it from top to bottom, except Makoto’s room. She isn’t ready for that yet. And once she’s cleaned, she cooks.

They find their new equilibrium. Mitsuru defers his entrance exams a year after all, citing his reason as an uncertainty as to his future. Their father slips back into his work role, but made the effort to not allow his family time to suffer any more. Their mother cleans the house again and again, until she can brave Makoto’s room… and, finally, all the things in there.

Makoto’s room tells a tale about him, even unprepared and caught in the passage of a normal life as it was left. The coat hanging behind his chair. The messily made bed. The papers scattered across his desk and even more stuffed into his drawer. The sketchbooks in a row on his shelf. The canvases leaning against the wall.

She recognises the one in front. She wonderes who’d put it there: Mitsuru or her husband or that girl who’d brought it here. Makoto had given it to Hiroka with a fleeting comment, but Hiroka gave it to them. ‘I would ruin it,’ she said, eyes shining when she showed them the horse drowning in the water, and the angel beckoning to him. ‘Makoto painted himself: the drowning soul who had found hope. You should keep it.’

But hope had been too bright then, too raw. So someone had put it into Makoto’s room and they’d left it there.

That painting… and the sketchbook too.

She opens it now. There are some old sketches, and some newer ones. One of a love hotel that makes her gasp but she stares at it anyway. Sees how he’d accentuated it with shades. How she and the flamenco instructor are in one corner. How a young girl and a much older man are in another. Is that Hiroka? But she shouldn’t ask. She is not that girl’s mother and if Makoto had given Hiroka a painting that symbolised his finding hope and kept that photo of her on his phone, then she doesn’t have the right to judge her.

She flips through the rest of the pages. There is some scenery. The shrine. Some trains. The river. The school. And, on the last page, Makoto and Mitsuru like the brothers they hadn’t often been.

It’s his last sketch: what he’d been drawing when he died. It is Mitsuru, with a tender concern they barely saw on him and a scene, though frank and swift, that meant the world to all of them.

The doctors and some god out there saved him when he’d swallowed those pills, but that was a long struggle and so abstract, when it looked like they’d all been too late. And then those neighbourhood boys had beaten him up and Mitsuru found him: too late again, but carrying him on his back like that bed vanishing into the resus bay…

Makoto hadn’t drawn the hospital, but instead Mitsuru who’d gone to find him. And those scrawled words under the sketch. Why choose those?

And for the horse drowning in the sea, he hadn’t drawn a blackness in the deep or even a sun overhead, but an angel.

It is about hope… but, she realised, borrowed time as well.

As if someone hadn’t wanted Makoto to leave them on those terms. The message under the sketch of Mitsuru proves Makoto tried to change those terms.

She cries. She thought she’d be out of tears but she cries. He forgave her, for a sin that nearly ripped their family apart and killed him. And he dies after that forgiveness, and after finding friends and a place in the world and a future he wants to chase.

But the angel of death came back to him, this time with a different message.

She turns the painting around. It’s no longer hope. That painting has taken on a double-meaning now and it’s abstract, or the truth, but either way she can’t quite bear it any longer.

She closes the sketchbook too. That message, as well, is both good and unbearable.


	7. Friends

Saotome is as caught off guard as anyone. Makoto is making plans with him after school, and then he’s just… gone.

Shoko feels worse, he knows, because Shoko was the last person to see him alive and the first person to find him dead, as well. It’s no wonder, then, that she hasn’t come to school since. He’s heard her parents are moving her.

Good for her, probably. Even if it’s for the wrong reasons, she’ll be happier in a class that won’t turn on her now that they’ve lost their first punch bag.

Saotome wishes he’d been stronger. Perhaps then he could have reached out to Makoto before it was almost too late to matter. Perhaps then he could have done something more than casual courtesy for Shoko – because he’d tried to be something more, but there was something about Shoko that made him uncomfortable.

Makoto had felt the same way, but when he’d said he needed to speak to her, that last day, Saotome wondered if he hadn’t figured it out and seen her in a new and better light because of it. He can’t ask, now. He can’t do a lot of things. Take the entrance exams with Makoto. Go to high school with Makoto. Travel on every train in Japan and see every train line. Make new friends so they’re not at the bottom of the class (or their punching bags).

His reasons for befriending Makoto were pretty selfish, he realises. He wants to rationalise that and say they’re all selfish, to an extent. But he and Makoto got along better than he’d expected. Enough for him to regret all the time they’d wasted before talking to each other.

He regrets it even more now in retrospect. Intuitively, they all know time doesn’t come back, but it’s not until Makoto isn’t in front of him anymore that he really appreciates that.

He’s got a big family, and he wonders how big the hole would be if one of them vanished from this earth.

Makoto only has one older brother. They’ll feel that loss keenly. He only has one close school friend: one person he’d spent his afternoons outside of home with, and go look at antique trains and hop on the local trains and talk about catching the bullet train together once their exams were done…

He’s not quite sure what to do with himself anymore.

Class was subdued for a while, but now it’s only the flowers on Makoto’s desk and the painting on one of the walls that tells the tale of his absence. And Shoko’s empty chair, as well. And the cloud that hangs over them even while their classmates move on. They mention him too much at first, then too little, and then they find the medium that shows they, as a class, are moving on as well.

The entrance exams come. Saotome does better than he expects and he can only attribute that to all those study sessions with Makoto.

Maybe he’s telling himself that he’s done it for Makoto, too.

He gets into the school they want. His parents congratulate him: it’s the perfect end for them, who can’t afford any of the private schools without a scholarship, with a son who’s near the bottom of the class. His little siblings ask if his friend’s gotten in as well.

He doesn’t remind them. They’re still too young to grasp the permanence of death. And he’s got his own weight to carry. Knowing he went home without waiting for Makoto, because Makoto had said he had things to take care of. Had he, then, already known? If Saotome had stayed instead, could he have changed something?

If he’d just talked to him before, could he have changed things? And not just now, but his suicide attempt six months ago: the skeleton in the closet dragged out by reporters and their entire district didn’t have the right to know.

Makoto hadn’t told Sataome everything, but he’d said enough. He’d explained the tension in their family. How he’d been in the hospital for some time and missed a month of school as a consequence. And Saotome had seen how, before that, their classmates would tease and poke and snatch his drawings and crush them underfoot and, sometimes, kick him till his ribs bruised. He’s only guessing about the bruises, but it’s an educated guess.

It doesn’t matter now. They haven’t sought out a new punching bag yet, with both Makoto and Shoko not there. Maybe they won’t. Maybe the almost-suicide has frightened them. Maybe Saotome’s the only one who’s only thinking about that in the sense of a stepping stone.

Was it a stepping stone? Did the overdose make his heart weak, or something? Is that what happened? Did it make his time shorter?

He doesn’t know. And there’s nothing he can do about it now and, when he does visit the Kobayashis, they say he’s done enough, _more_ than enough, by becoming the friend to Makoto that allowed him to start hoping and planning for the future again.

That makes him feel worse because Makoto won’t be getting that future now, but also… better. It was too little, too late for Makoto, but he did something, something that helped…

He’ll go see Shoko, he decides. Shoko was Makoto’s friend too, in the end. And Hiroko. Maybe he’s waited too long to reach out of them too. But maybe it’s not too late. He doesn’t know. He won’t know until something happens and they look back: in retrospect.


	8. Family

Makoto’s attempted suicide is what brings them together on the brink of falling apart. Makoto’s death six months later doesn’t shift the family dynamics so drastically, in comparison.

Maybe it’s because they’d been on the way to patching things up, and now they’re caught in that awkward place where they’ve patched up as much as they can with a missing piece and they simply have to bear with the rest.

Their father isn’t sure how they’re going to cope with the rest. There’s too much blame to go around, and too many what-ifs. Two of Makoto’s three friends have dropped by and they can’t really blame the third for not. Saotome thinks she might have moved. Maybe that’s the best thing for her.

But friends and family are different. Friends have their own still-whole families to support them. Friends can move away, move on – and, someday, they may not remember the classmate that had suddenly vanished from their lives.

Family would never be able to cover or refill that hole.

He is careful not to work too much again. That was the start of it all, last time. Or perhaps not, because whatever happened between Mitsuru and Makoto is a mystery to all of them, including the two involved. Maybe it’s just the price of growing up: growing apart. Or maybe there’d been something they’d noticed but hadn’t been able to put words or feelings to. They’d still been children, after all. As for Mitsuru now… he’s eighteen, making the big decision to defer college for a year while he sorts out what he wants to do (because he’s not as keen to become a doctor now, even though their father isn’t sure if that’s because he’s seen a different side now, he feels as though they failed or a mix of those and other factors).

But he’s trying, even if he’s trying alone.

His wife is trying to. Cleaning so that the house sparkles like never before and he knows she’s slowly working herself up into opening Makoto’s door. And then it does open, and it’s obvious when it does because she’s left it open that night.

He doesn’t go in, though. He needs to work himself up to that too. And it’s not about accepting Makoto’s gone. That’s plain enough. It’s not about forgiving or forgetting, either. They can’t forget. They can’t wholly forgive either, because they all feel like they carry a part of the blame. It’s just about taking those next steps. And not just with Makoto, but with Mitsuru and his wife as well.

He and Mitsuru haven’t done anything together for a while.

Fishing is a good go-to father-son bonding activity.

                ‘I need to study,’ says Mitsuru brusquely. He’s still not sure what he’s studying for, but the obsessive studying hasn’t slowed down at all. It’s only increased, and gotten more broad, as though Mitsuru is preparing for everything and yet nothing.

                ‘You can bring your books,’ he offers. ‘Get some fresh air. Talk to your old dad.’

When it was Makoto, he suggested the sketchbook instead. And Makoto sits on a rock and draws the river.

Mitsuru sits on the very same rock and reads. For a moment, his father just watches him. But he doesn’t say it. Mitsuru is not Makoto and it’s not fair to make such comparisons when it’s a time just for the two of them.

                ‘How’s studying going?’ he asks, instead.

Mitsuru shrugs. ‘It’s going.’

                ‘Any ideas about what you want to do?’

He shrugs again. ‘Something where I can’t make mistakes.’ A pause, and then he adds: ‘Not that there is such a place.’

                ‘Probably not,’ his father agrees. ‘We humans are like that: imperfect, always making mistakes. But that also makes our opportunities so precious.’

                ‘Not if you screw them up and don’t get another chance,’ Mitsuru mutters, before turning away.

                ‘If you knew you’d get a second chance, wouldn’t you be more careless with your first one?’ his father asks, rhetorically.

Mitsuru appears to consider that. His book snaps shut. His hair ruffles in the wind. ‘Maybe,’ he considers finally. ‘It is more logical to use the first chance, if you’re guaranteed a second one, for learning as much as possible. Then use the second in a manner that’s got the greatest likelihood of success based off what you’ve learnt from the first.’

                ‘Logical, yes,’ his father agrees. ‘But we humans can’t know the future. Unless you buy into that fortune-telling stuff, I guess.’

None of them really do. Somehow, cynicism had turned into a Kobayashi family trait.

                ‘We don’t know whether we’ll get second chances or not,’ he continued. ‘We were very lucky, when Makoto survived. We all tried hard to fix things.’

                ‘Makoto didn’t, at first,’ says Mitsuru. ‘It was like he didn’t care about his second chance. And when he did start caring, he was gone before anything changed.’

A lot of things had changed, but the frustration that bled into Mitsuru’s voice gives his meaning away.

                ‘Between the two of you, you mean?’ His father reels in his empty line. ‘Your mother says there’s a message for you from Makoto.’

Mitsuru drops his book and it tumbles down rocks and into the river.

                ‘I’m sure,’ his father continues, ‘that Makoto wished he’d used his second chance to mend things with you a little better, but he tried.’ He tried with all of them, after it had seemed like they’d never manage to.


	9. Beautiful

Hiroka misses the painting almost as soon as she hands it to Makoto’s mother, but she knows she’ll only destroy it one day if she keeps it.

There are other paintings in the art room, anyway. The class picks one to hang in the classroom in his memory. There’s another one missing, as well as Shoko. Her easel is still there, though. Perhaps she means to come back. Or perhaps she doesn’t.

Hiroka knows all the members of the art club, and all of their paintings. No-one paints quite like Makoto does. No-one paints quite like Shoko either.

She’d thought Shoko’s paintings were ugly. She reconsiders now, pulling out the last abstract painting she’d been working on. It just looked like shapes and blotches, at first glance. Black, with shadows of colour like it tried and failed to be something other than black.

“Live a colourful life” is the last words Makoto said – or, rather, wrote. The sketchbook is also at the Kobayashi’s house and probably meant for his family, but the school had found him first. Someone had read it, and the words spread like wildfire after that.

“Live a colourful life”. They all wonder what it means. And staring at Shoko’s painting now, Hiroko wonders if this is another attempt to understand that. Except it can’t be, because Shoko hasn’t been back to school since. She may not even know about the message, even if she _had_ been at the scene.

In any case, this painting was done before Makoto wrote the words.

Hiroka had thought the pair didn’t get along. Saotome says otherwise, and Saotome would know better, she supposes. Makoto knows about her, but how much does she know about Makoto? Not a whole lot, at the end of the day. She just smiles at him like all the other boys who stare at her and call her pretty, except he knows more about the person wearing expensive clothes and going into love hotels in the arms of older men.

Makoto didn’t react the way she’d expected. Not in the aftermath, anyway. At the time he’d stood there, shocked, as she smiled and thanked him for a chivalry that was wasted on her and then gone back. But he’d had time to think, by then. Offered her the painting of the horse and the angel: that beautiful piece that she both wanted to savour and wanted to splatter with black ink.

Now it’s with the Kobayashis, where it truly belongs.

Shoko’s painting isn’t like that. Beautiful is far from the words she wants to use to describe it, but that doesn’t make it meaningless. She remembers Shoko’s description of Makoto’s painting, and the way Makoto had tensed up at those words and the meaning they implied.

Maybe Shoko’s interpretation had been the right one, after all.

Hiroko wonders what her interpretation of Makoto’s last words would have been. Something like this is the answer she comes to, in the end, even if Shoko painted this first. Who knew? Maybe they’d talked about it before. Maybe the words were Shoko’s to begin with, or from some book they’d both read or some artist they’re both familiar with.

Shoko isn’t beautiful. Neither is her work. But there’s something telling about the both of them.

Hiroka talks to the supervisor and takes the painting home. This, at least, will survive the pendulum that is Hiroka, and be her memory of Makoto, and invariably Shoko as well.

Shoko who calls Hiroka a “bad girl”… but it is the truth, just like when she pointed out how Makoto had changed into someone that attracted the better sort of attention and yet wasn’t really him. And Makoto changed back. In the last couple of months, he was the old Makoto who’d straightened out a few things and that was so much better. Except that Makoto doesn’t blush when he sees her, but rather smiles and makes small-talk and accepts a pocky stick… and she prefers that. Even after he learns the truth, she prefers that. In fact, it was somewhat comforting, knowing he smiles at her even knowing that.

“Live a colourful life,” Makoto says.

Well, Hiroka thinks her life is both colourful and not. She showers herself in expensive things, but they don’t last. She can’t have them stay for very long before the need to destroy them bubbles up. What does a colourful life really mean? A life of excitement? A life of joy? She has the first, she supposes. Moreso than others her age, anyway. But she doesn’t really have the second. Not the deep-seated joy that lasts, anyway.

She wants to find something that will last.

And she’ll never know whether or not that would have destroyed Makoto.


	10. Graduation

Their class is still two students down when graduation comes. Shoko is confirmed to have moved to another town, and flowers still sit on Makoto’s desk. They’re fresh flowers today: a bouquet the class has pitched in to buy from a proper florist this time, instead of the cheaper ones from the supermarket up till now.

It’s a special occasion, after all. Some of them might forget all about the missing two by next year. And that’s okay. That’s part of growing up, growing older, and growing apart. And others will remember: those who are already old and won’t move much further, and those who were too close.

Today, at least, they’re all close. Today, at least, they remember. And they remember the good.

It’s been four months since. Winter has passed into spring. They’ve all changed a little along the way. Finished their entrance exams. Found high-schools across the region to go to. Now they’re saying farewell to this school and the friends and memories they’ve made in it.

And without fuel to feed the fire, they only speak of happier things.

It’s surprising how much they remember, and how much they forget. Makoto’s painting hangs behind them and they talk about the school festival and how his paintings would always fetch a high price in the auctions. And there’d always be a few offered by the art department, because Makoto painted too many paintings and didn’t take most of them home. He called them incomplete, some of the other students would say. None of them really understood _why_ Makoto would consider them incomplete, when they were so beautiful. Even if he hadn’t been that beautiful, or so admired.

They talk, now, of a future that’ll never be. Wonder if he’d been planning on going to some art school, and Saotome who knows that’s not true doesn’t speak up to correct them. Perhaps he’s also wondering if Makoto would have gone somewhere like that, if he they hadn’t become friends. Or maybe he’s thinking he’s the one who turned Makoto away from that path.

They’re all moot points, now. Things that mattered once upon a time but are only parts of precious memories, now. But that’s the point of thinking of such pointless things: keeping those memories alive, in a time like this where they’re celebrating and reminiscing and mourning as well, together.

The funeral should have been something like this, their homeroom teacher thinks, but it had gotten too big and too noisy and somewhat out of control. Or maybe that’s what funerals are supposed to be: drowning in raw emotion and people digging in the closet to drag out every skeleton they find. Even when it’s bad manners to speak ill of the dead. Even when the media should have only written a small obituary and not blown the whole thing out of proportion.

The students are more subdued than the usual graduating classes, but their homeroom teacher is satisfied with how things have gone by the end of it. Like all teachers in his shoes, he wishes his two absent students had been present as well. But they’re there in spirit, their contributions to the classroom and the school still remembered… and then they’ll pack it all away and there’ll be a new graduating class in this room next year.

He may be teaching them as well. He may not. He wonders how long they’ll recall the boy who painted their school from the rooftop last summer, and how long that painting will hang on the wall before the class or their decide to take it down and put something else there instead.

Slowly, the objects that house those memories will disappear from the school. Some of them will forget immediately. Others will remember a little longer.

He thinks, as a homeroom teacher whose student died, he’ll remember for a good while longer. But the rest of his class is graduating, and much of them will be replaced by his new next year’s class.


	11. Birthday

Makoto’s birthday comes. His mother makes a cake anyway, even if nobody eats it. They all prepare presents as well: the predictable ones because Makoto’s always running low on canvases and sketch-books and other art supplies by this time. Mitsuru will always get a book of some sort: sometimes art, sometimes something more academically oriented. This time, it’s Van Gogh biographies and he realises it’s in bad taste but he can’t help but feel a little bitter, still.

It doesn’t matter, anyway. They’ll keep better than paint tubes, which is why none of them brought those. They’re thinking practically, at least, even if the entire endeavour is impractical.

Cleaning Makoto’s room all the time is impractical as well, but their mother keeps on doing it. It’d be more sensible to store the things they want to keep, and get rid of the rest. Give the clothes to charity or something. Leave the furniture if they’re making it into a spare room, or else just get rid of it. Store the paintings and the sketchbooks. Get rid of the used art supplies… especially the tubes of paint which were no doubt long since dried up.

They take out photos. The parents curl up on the couch together and reminisce, one photo at a time. Mitsuru watches them for a bit, and then leaves them. He can see the merit of reminiscing, but they didn’t spend a lot of happy memories together, in the end.

He goes upstairs instead. The door to Makoto’s room is open, letting the air in. It’s just like it always is: paintings stacked against one wall, sketchbooks where there should have been textbooks instead. But Makoto never was the studious type. It was only after he befriended Saotome and decided to go to the same high school at him did he even start to put effort into his studies.

Mitsuru can’t help but be a little bitter towards that sentiment as well, because couldn’t he have been that motivation instead?

He’s inside the room before he quite realises it, after nearly a year of avoiding it.

The painting at the forefront of the stack is of a horse and an angel in the water. The horse is drowning, he thinks. The angel is offering a hand. Or maybe it’s not an angel. It looks too human, and what human saves someone else from the goodness of their hearts. Doctors are paid to do it.

He doesn’t want to be a doctor after all, he realises. He’s thought maybe he doesn’t, but here’s the conviction behind it. He doesn’t want to become a doctor. He wants something else. To understand. To knock down whatever wall had come between him and his brother.

It’s too late for any of that now. Unless he believes in reincarnation or spirits or such, and he doesn’t, not at all. It might be nice though, he muses, sitting on the neatly made bed. Might be nice to imagine there being another chance, believing that Makoto will return and one day he’ll die and return and they might do better at being brothers in the next life and world. But they’re also useless thoughts, because he’s living in this world and Makoto isn’t there anymore.

It’s too logical, his father might say. But his father is also a businessman. He’s always shrewd, and logical.

But being logical isn’t making him any happier. _What should I be doing to make me happy?_

His hand brushes against something cold. He blinks and stares down. There’s a sketchbook on the bed and he’s touching the metal bindings. He pulls his hand away, then touches it more consciously. How long has it been sitting there? Probably since someone returned it to their family.

He opens it slowly. All manner of drawings greet him. There are some from the school, and all of them scream of loneliness to him. He doesn’t understand it at all. He never has, but Makoto’s drawings always have something more than just lines and shades on a page.

That’s art, he supposes, and he’s a logical guy who can’t grasp the abstract meanings they flaunt.

Maybe he’d understand Makoto if he tried harder to understand.

There are art courses in college, too. Art making courses. Art appreciation courses. The first of them would have been for Makoto, but maybe he, Mitsuru, can chase the second instead. Learn about art: its styles, its history, its interpretation…

Maybe his subconsciousness had been trying to tell him something else when he picked up that biography of Van Gogh.


	12. Drawings

It takes only a moment longer to open up the sketchbook, now that it’s within his reach. The first pages are a lonely school and Mitsuru remembers his own time at his school, and thinks maybe they weren’t so different after all: him and Makoto. He’d go to the library and study. Makoto would find a quiet place and draw.

He flips past the rest of the school drawings. He knows it well enough, after all. And the loneliness and ill-fitting walls are too familiar and too easy to read. He’s known all of it on some level, anyway. He just didn’t help. He was unable to help, because he never figured out how to do anything about it himself.

There are scenes of the house as well. Mostly his bedroom. Is that what a safe haven is supposed to look like? It doesn’t look quite right, Mitsuru thinks. The room itself is fine, but there’s something… clinical about it, something stiff. And with how loudly the loneliness had screamed from previous pages, Mitsuru is sure that was on purpose. And it’s not just in his bedroom, but all the pictures of his house.

It changes abruptly when he finds the river scene. This must be when Makoto went fishing with their father, he thinks. Similar to the trip Mitsuru made with him a couple of months ago. The scene’s different though, for some reason. Objectively, it’s quite similar. But there’s something in the undercurrents, some emotion, that’s different.

He’s sure their father would have talked to Makoto about something. It probably wasn’t what he wanted to study in college. Maybe not what high school he wanted to go to either, because maybe then they wouldn’t have been caught unaware when Makoto finally told them his plans. Maybe it was about home. The way Makoto shut himself away from everyone even more obviously than before, like he was actively avoiding them instead of passively. And he was. He put blame on each of their shoulders. And, at some point, he started to turn around. But he died before Mitsuru got to enjoy that himself.

It’s not fair. Makoto made new friends but didn’t reconcile with his own brother. Even if Makoto probably hadn’t known he was going to die six months after surviving his own suicide attempt.

Mitsuru finds himself gripping the sketchbook too hard. It’s too unfair, on too many levels. But logically, people don’t pick under which circumstances they’ll die. That’s why they have to live their one life like every moment is precious to them.

But they’re humans. They squander so much time it’s a wonder every human in the world doesn’t die loaded with regrets. Or maybe they do. It’s not exactly a feasible study to run. He doubts anyone will ever try.

He flips the pages further. There are more drawings of home, and school, and some of the city. There’s the love hotel and Mitsuru can’t stand that picture because it’s a turning point. Not the start of their family crumbling, or Makoto’s fate, but a turning point.

He flips past it. There are a few human sketches and that’s a surprise because they’re the first in this sketchbook. There’s one of that girl – Hiroka. A few of Saotome. A few more of the girl who’d visited them once and never again. His teacher. Them.

Mitsuru stared at the one of himself for a long moment. The drawing was soft and blurred, like Makoto didn’t really know how to define him.

 _Maybe that’s true,_ he thinks. They haven’t really sat down and talked or done something together without getting frustrated with each other for years. Neither of them are great at communicating. This is the outcome of that. He caresses the image lightly. He’s not that indistinct, but that’s only because the thought is his. If he had Makoto’s talent, a sketch of Makoto might appear equally indistinct. He’d use more black though, he thinks, instead of grey. Makoto’s drawing doesn’t look frustrated. It just looks… longing.

Eventually, Mitsuru can’t stand to look at it any more and turns the page again. And blinks. There’s a sketch of a boy, but not a boy Mitsuru’s ever seen before. There are a few more too, when he flicks through them. Sometimes, he looks other-worldly. At other times, he just looks like the sad observer. But none of that tells Mitsuru who that boy is.

And then he reaches the final drawing, and he’s reminded of his mother’s words. He’s staring at Makoto’s message to him now, isn’t he?


	13. Brothers

It’s a sketch of when Makoto had been beaten up and his shoes had been stolen. When he hadn’t come home and it had gotten late and so Mitsuru had grabbed his coat and boots and gone searching. When he’d found his younger brother outside the shrine, and carried him home on his back, mumbling dry encouragement whenever Makoto groaned in pain and wondering why he couldn’t talk like this all the time.

It’s that image, glowing with something that tugs at his heart. There’s on colour in it and it’s rushed. He can see it’s rushed. The lines are wobbly and rough, like he hadn’t had the time to erase them. He probably hadn’t. He’d been lying on top of this sketch when he’d been found, like he’d fallen asleep working on it. Except his eyes had been open, and he hadn’t been asleep. He’d died working on this sketch.

How much warning had he had? Was this image a work in progress even before that, or was it done especially to address his last regret? Or maybe he had other regrets as well. It’s presumptuous, Mitsuru thinks, to think of himself as his little brother’s only regret, or even to think of himself as a regret at all. Maybe Makoto hadn’t been thinking of him at all – but he’d been working on that sketch, that displays the two of them in this tender moment.

It can be nothing else but a message to him. And it’s warm, Mitsuru thinks, even without the colours. It’s trying to tell him something, something Makoto never put into words. Is it gratitude? Is it as simple as that, or is there something more in it?

He remembers carrying Makoto home that night. His little brother’s weight is warm on his back. Maybe that’s the sort of warmth Makoto drew. Or maybe he’s reading too much into things. It’s illogical, after all, to see warmth represented with grey shades in a black and white drawing. It’s illogical and that’s why he can’t understand, but wants to.

Mitsuru is no longer indistinct, in this sketch. Maybe it was because Makoto was drawing with a specific scene in mind, or perhaps Makoto had finally understood something he didn’t have time to put into words.

No… Mitsuru sees the scrawl at the bottom, where the signature usually goes. Makoto did have time for a few words. “Live a colourful life.”

What is a colourful life? he wonders. A life of adventure? A whirlwind of emotions? A life where every day was filled with joy? It’s as indiscernible as his art.

That about settles it, he thinks. He’ll be chasing the meaning of art in college, until he understands his brother’s paintings, drawings and cryptic words.

And then, if there’s a next life – another chance in the future somewhere – he’ll understand his little brother better. Because there’s no logic to that at all, but it’s hope, and a purpose, and whether true or false, that’s what it’s meant to serve.

He turns back to the sketch. Makoto is smiling in it, despite being covered in bruises and in pain. Mitsuru is smiling too, though the worry in his gaze is palpable. He’s a moment in which they came together, a moment they could have used as a springboard yet they failed to do so – but here it is nonetheless: a special moment Makoto felt the need to immortalise with the last sand grains of time.

It was as though he was acknowledging Mitsuru’s love for his brother, the love he had such difficulty expressing when face to face with him. Acknowledging that, apologising for not saying it to him directly when he had the chance (because who’d thought their life would run out again, so quickly?), and telling to live: live a colourful life.

Whatever sort of life that is, he doubts Makoto means for it to be choking on regrets and indecision.

                ‘’kaa-san. ‘tou-san.’ He goes back downstairs. ‘I want to study art at college.’


	14. Colourful Life

PuraPura doesn’t have many successes to speak of, so training the failures like him takes up all his time for a while. But still, every now and then he peaks in on Makoto’s family and friends. He has to keep up with his success stories, after all.

Makoto’s gone, but the impressions he made in his six months of overtime remain. And PuraPura gets to see it all. Sees the holes it’s left in people’s hearts. And sees the way he’s filled them, as well.

And he’s happy for Makoto. He really is. Especially when Mitsuru finally sees the message left for him. Really, he should feel honoured, that someone used their last moments to give a message to them and them alone. But Makoto’s message is quite ambiguous. It could mean many different things, and be for many people. In that sense, it’s probably a good thing Makoto didn’t have time to close his notebook. It’s better this way. It’s reached more people.

It missed someone, though. The girl whose nose it has been in front of, because a dead body was just too distracting. PuraPura thinks he’s been desensitised to this sort of thing by now, but it’s different for a junior high school girl who’s never seen anyone dead before.

And Makoto’s message is passed over, with that shock. And because she never comes back, she doesn’t hear the whispers of it spreading. But even she’s not doing too badly. She’s making an effort to follow the words she hasn’t heard, in a place she hasn’t lived before because she needs a fresh start: fresh scenery, fresh classmates and there’s no bullying or dead friends there, at least for now. Maybe it was Makoto talking to her before going to the roof that makes the difference. Maybe not. But even Shoko will live a colourful life, Makoto thinks. Shoko, and Mitsuru too. They were the two Makoto had been most concerned about. The two PuraPura had been most concerned about too.

Makoto’s suicide broke a lot of hearts. In the six months overtime he received, he’s managed to mend them all. ‘I’d give that effort an A plus,’ he says aloud, though there’s no-one to hear. That’s fine. No-one needs to hear.

Or maybe Makoto can hear him, in heaven.

He keeps on talking, just in case. ‘Everyone’s doing well, you know. You chose a good final message to leave behind.’

He’d worked hard along the way, too. Sure, he’d lazed around at the beginning, not grasping his situation nor the context he was in. Can’t blame him, PuraPura muses. Spirits sent for overtime don’t maintain their previous memories; they’re instead given to a guardian, like himself, for safekeeping. So it’s pretty hard to be invested in a life they believe to be somebody else’s, especially when they come across whatever it was that tipped them over the edge in the first place. Often, encouragement isn’t enough. It’s almost an unfair test, from God.

Makoto pulls it off though, in the end. And PuraPura is proud, because a success for his charge means he’s one step closer to his own heaven, and he’ll keep on working hard. It’s a little late for him to have a colourful life of his own. It’s a little late for his charges too, who only get another six months from their death as overtime. But the people they touch: the hearts they break and can put back together… those people have a second chance that keeps on going, unlike the dead. They should move past their regrets and live freely. They should experience a range of scenes and emotions: laugh, cry, be angry or sad… Life is a blank canvas and they should splatter it with every colour in the palette and then make new colours for themselves.

The ones like PuraPura are the ones who couldn’t manage beyond black and shades of grey when still alive.


End file.
